Geniální přítelkyně 1 - Dětství a dospívání – Ferrante Elena (2025)

This novel is the first volume of a four-part series that has captivated readers around the world and attracted considerable attention from literary critics. Set in a working-class neighbourhood on the outskirts of Naples in the 1950s, it tells the story of a female friendship through the memories of Elena, whose life has been shaped since childhood by the forceful personality of the brilliant Lila. Elena is equally important to Lila’s fate, as Lila sees her as the brilliant friend. At the heart of their complicated relationship is their struggle to survive in a man’s world, whose conventions confine them just as tightly as the boundaries of their neighbourhood, marked by hypocrisy and violence. The novel introduces not only its two protagonists but also the entire microcosm of the Neapolitan community, bound together by a dense web of conventions and passions rooted in fascism, the Second World War and the world before Elena and Lila. Through one neighbourhood, the narrator traces Italian society from post-war poverty to the economic miracle of the 1960s, including ideological and everyday conflicts between communists and members of the Camorra. The central theme remains the friendship of two very different heroines, portrayed with almost merciless openness as a system of communicating vessels, a painful reflection, a lifelong rivalry and a bond that often becomes suffocating. The contents are in Czech.